Why Does the Airplane Oxygen Mask Have a Bag That “May Not Inflate”?

If you’ve seen the airplane safety demonstration enough times, you know the drill for the oxygen masks. If there is a loss in cabin pressure the masks come down. First, you put yours over your face and pull the strap over your head, and then you help anyone else who needs it. Makes sense. You’re no good to others if you’ve passed out from lack of oxygen. But what about the next part, when they tell you that “although the bag on the oxygen mask may not inflate, oxygen is flowing to the mask”? If the bag doesn’t do anything important, why is it there?

The passenger airplane masks are “continuous flow” masks, which are different from “diluter demand” masks, which are what the crew have. A diluter demand mask only releases oxygen when the user inhales. This prevents waste of oxygen and allows the instruments on the mask to determine the exact oxygen level being delivered. It functions to make sure the crew stays alert enough to get the aircraft down into more oxygenated air.

A continuous flow mask is constantly releasing oxygen whether the user is inhaling or not. Passenger masks don’t have to function as efficiently because they’re there just to make sure you stay alive. Even with some waste, there's enough oxygen to sustain everyone until the airplane reaches denser air.

The bag on the mask allows for a bit of oxygen savings. If the mask is situated well on your face, the oxygen continuously coming out will collect in the bag as you are exhaling instead of seeping out the sides of the mask. (The air-flow on any oxygen mask is one-way. Exhaled breath does not travel back into the tube, but out of valves on the mask.) However, even if there is a good seal, if you are breathing fast (which is probably what’s going to happen in a panicky situation), you’ll probably suck down what’s going through the bag before it fills. They don't want people thinking, "Hey this thing's not doing anything!" and taking off the mask or freaking out if their neighbor's bag inflates but theirs doesn't. That’s why the safety demonstration wants to reassure you that, yes, your mask is still doing its job even if the bag isn’t inflating. You’ve got enough to worry about if the oxygen masks are down. Your oxygen mask bag shouldn’t be one of them.

When driving down a road where speed limits are oppressively low, or high enough to let drivers get away with reckless behavior, it's easy to blame the government for getting it wrong. But you and your fellow drivers play a bigger a role in determining speed limits than you might think.

Before cities can come up with speed limit figures, they first need to look at how fast motorists drive down certain roads when there are no limitations. According to The Sacramento Bee, officials conduct speed surveys on two types of roads: arterial roads (typically four-lane highways) and collector streets (two-lane roads connecting residential areas to arterials). Once the data has been collected, they toss out the fastest 15 percent of drivers. The thinking is that this group is probably going faster than what's safe and isn't representative of the average driver. The sweet spot, according to the state, is the 85th percentile: Drivers in this group are thought to occupy the Goldilocks zone of safety and efficiency.

Officials use whatever speed falls in the 85th percentile to set limits for that street, but they do have some wiggle room. If the average speed is 33 mph, for example, they’d normally round up to 35 or down to 30 to reach the nearest 5-mph increment. Whether they decide to make the number higher or lower depends on other information they know about that area. If there’s a risky turn, they might decide to round down and keep drivers on the slow side.

A road’s crash rate also comes into play: If the number of collisions per million miles traveled for that stretch of road is higher than average, officials might lower the speed limit regardless of the 85th percentile rule. Roads that have a history of accidents might also warrant a special signal or sign to reinforce the new speed limit.

For other types of roads, setting speed limits is more of a cut-and-dry process. Streets that run through school zones, business districts, and residential areas are all assigned standard speed limits that are much lower than what drivers might hit if given free rein.

We know that bacteria range in size from 0.2 micrometers to nearly one millimeter. That’s more than a thousand-fold difference, easily enough to accommodate a small bacterium inside a larger one.

Nothing forbids bacteria from invading other bacteria, and in biology, that which is not forbidden is inevitable.

We have at least one example: Like many mealybugs, Planococcus citri has a bacterial endosymbiont, in this case the β-proteobacterium Tremblaya princeps. And this endosymbiont in turn has the γ-proteobacterium Moranella endobialiving inside it. See for yourself:

I don’t know of examples of free-living bacteria hosting other bacteria within them, but that reflects either my ignorance or the likelihood that we haven’t looked hard enough for them. I’m sure they are out there.

Most (not all) scientists studying the origin of eukaryotic cells believe that they are descended from Archaea.

All scientists accept that the mitochondria which live inside eukaryotic cells are descendants of invasive alpha-proteobacteria. What’s not clear is whether archeal cells became eukaryotic in nature—that is, acquired internal membranes and transport systems—before or after acquiring mitochondria. The two scenarios can be sketched out like this:

The two hypotheses on the origin of eukaryotes:

(A) Archaezoan hypothesis.

(B) Symbiotic hypothesis.

The shapes within the eukaryotic cell denote the nucleus, the endomembrane system, and the cytoskeleton. The irregular gray shape denotes a putative wall-less archaeon that could have been the host of the alpha-proteobacterial endosymbiont, whereas the oblong red shape denotes a typical archaeon with a cell wall. A: archaea; B: bacteria; E: eukaryote; LUCA: last universal common ancestor of cellular life forms; LECA: last eukaryotic common ancestor; E-arch: putative archaezoan (primitive amitochondrial eukaryote); E-mit: primitive mitochondrial eukaryote; alpha:alpha-proteobacterium, ancestor of the mitochondrion.

The Archaezoan hypothesis has been given a bit of a boost by the discovery of Lokiarcheota. This complex Archaean has genes for phagocytosis, intracellular membrane formation and intracellular transport and signaling—hallmark activities of eukaryotic cells. The Lokiarcheotan genes are clearly related to eukaryotic genes, indicating a common origin.

Bacteria-within-bacteria is not only not a crazy idea, it probably accounts for the origin of Eucarya, and thus our own species.

We don’t know how common this arrangement is—we mostly study bacteria these days by sequencing their DNA. This is great for detecting uncultivatable species (which are 99 percent of them), but doesn’t tell us whether they are free-living or are some kind of symbiont. For that, someone would have to spend a lot of time prepping environmental samples for close examination by microscopic methods, a tedious project indeed. But one well worth doing, as it may shed more light on the history of life—which is often a history of conflict turned to cooperation. That’s a story which never gets old or stale.